Book Review: Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody

 

Apparently this is the book you need on plotting your own novel...so being a writer myself I'll need to check this one out.

In this book, Brody breaks down what makes a great novel for us and gives us the building blocks we need to plan our our own stories. She also gives us quite a few practical examples using famous novels, breaking each of them down and showing how they used the building blocks she gave us.

I can see why this is such a liked book: It's incredibly simple yet also useful in breaking down what makes novels work and how to use the tools Brody gave us. She shows us that despite many, many famous novels being all very different in plot, characters, etc., most of them can still be broken down in the very same template of how events happen and characters are used. 

Of course, the argument could be made that making stories using the template Brody gives us makes things formulaic, but the book makes very clear that, like I just stated, this is just what makes most novels work no matter how different. It's just the very basic building blocks a good story has, no matter how different.

I just found this to be a very handy tool and I'll definitely be using it for my future writing. Plotting has always been the hardest thing for me as a writer, and Brody's building blocks will definitely make this a lot easier for me. The book, despite being quite expansive, is also written in a really simple and easily accessible way. I thought maybe some writing jargon and tools were going to be used that I wouldn't be able to understand, but everything is broken down very well and made very clear by Brody, a neat plus.

Yeah, a really good book on writing I recommend! 

Rating: 4/5